Brazilian bees of the species Eufriesea purpurata are known to tolerate very high concentrations of DDT. As reported in the literature, these bees have suffered no harm from as much as 2 mg/bee, which is in the per-cent range of the body weight. In 1979, individuals of E. purpurata were captured as they collected DDT from walls of remote, rural houses in Brazil. Reported herein are quantities a...

Despite the ban on persistent organochlorines (OCs) in most of the developed nations, their usage continued until recently in many Asian developing countries including Vietnam, for agricultural purposes and vector-borne disease eradication programs. In this study, we collected human breast milk samples from the two big cities in Vietnam: Hanoi (n=42) and Hochiminh (n=44) and determined the conc...

The Antarctic continent is among the most pristine regions; yet various organic contaminants have been measured there routinely. Air and snow samples were collected during the austral spring (October-November, 2010) along the western Antarctic Peninsula and analyzed for organochlorine pesticides (OCPs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) to assess the re...

BACKGROUND An increased rate of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) has been repeatedly observed among farmers, but identification of specific exposures that explain this observation has proven difficult. METHODS During the 1980s, the National Cancer Institute conducted three case-control studies of NHL in the midwestern United States. These pooled data were used to examine pesticide exposures in fa...

Concentrations in surface waters (including particulate phase) of the River Chenab ranged from 27-1100 ng L(-1) and 25-1200 ng L(-1) for OCPs and 7.7-110 ng L(-1) and 13-99 ng L(-1) for PCBs during summer and winter, respectively from 2007-2009. DDTs exhibited the highest concentration, followed by HCHs > chlordane > ∑(24)PCBs > ∑other OCPs. Different indicative ratios for organochlorines sugge...

A low impact (dispersed) design demonstrated how small alterations to parking lots can reduce runoff and pollutant loads. A whole basin approach utilized the entire watershed for stormwater management. Storm runoff was treated as soon as rain hit the ground by routing it through a network of swales, strands and finally into a small wet detention pond. When the volume of water from all the diffe...

Rapid expansion of coastal anthropogenic development means that critical foraging and developmental habitats often occur near highly polluted and urbanized environments. Although coastal contamination is widespread, the impact this has on long-lived vertebrates like the green turtle (Chelonia mydas) is unclear because traditional experimental methods cannot be applied. We coupled minimally inva...

During the past decades, many epidemiological, toxicological and biological studies have been performed to assess the role of environmental chemicals as potential toxicants associated with diverse human disorders. However, the relationships between diseases based on chemical exposure rarely have been studied by computational biology. We developed a human environmental disease network (EDN) to e...

Current regulatory paradigms have favored a shift from persistent pesticides that amplify in aquatic food webs to pesticides with reduced persistence and bioaccumulative potential (low log K(OW)). Although these new generation pesticides preferentially partition away from food web-associated lipids, aquatic biota may nonetheless be exposed to them via other environmental compartments. To charac...

Negative chemical ionization mass spectrometry with a mixture of isobutane, methylene chloride, and oxygen as the reagent gas has been used to explore contamination of environmental substrates with xenobiotic chemicals. The substrates in question, fish tissue, human seminal plasma, and human adipose tissue, were cleaned up by one of the following three cleanup procedures: (1) continuous liquid-...